Record Massive BLACK HOLES discovered lurking in monster galaxies

                               Click on picture to enlarge. It looks awesome.

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | December 5, 2011

BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley. Astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

These black holes are at the centers of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth, and may be the dark remnants of some of the very bright galaxies, called quasars, that populated the early universe. (...)

Black holes are dense concentrations of matter that produce such strong gravitational fields that even light cannot escape. While exploding stars, called supernovas, can leave behind black holes the mass of a single star like the sun, supermassive black holes have presumably grown from the merger of other black holes or by capturing huge numbers of stars and massive amounts of gas. (...)
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/12/05/record-black-holes-bigger-than-our-solar-system/

An artist's concept of stars moving in the central regions of a giant elliptical galaxy that harbors a supermassive black hole. (Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook)

http://vimeo.com/dunlapinstitute/mostmassiveblackholes
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7376/pdf/nature10636.pdf